Week 4's Reflection: Technology Helps us to Read, Write, and Teach

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Week 4 has been the answer of my problems in teaching because I've finally found the tools and activities to support me in teaching writing and reading. If you ask me what is the most challenging task in teaching language among the four skills, I will say "WRITING". I my self can say that I am a good writer. I do not write and publish a lot. I have just published one book, one undergraduate thesis, and one master thesis. I should also admit that when I was student, I did plagiarized for some of the papers for my courses. Therefore, teaching writing to my students is actually teaching my self to write better.

After reading two articles from ESL Journals about the use of technology in teaching writing and reading. Krajka (2000) inspired me to use technology for activities such as writing a letter to a friend, a formal letter, a biography, a description of a person, a for-and-against essay, a notice and an advertisement, a description of a festival/ceremony, a description of a book/film/play, a newspaper report, an opinion essay and a description of a place. While Liang (2004) suggested to use authentic e-texts outside of the classroom and to improve students overall reading, writing and thinking skills by synthesizing and evaluating online materials with peers. Simple activities recommended by Liang (2004) like choosing, reading, sharing, and evaluating books can be very good project to improve students' reading ability. I believe that this is also an interesting way to invite students to write more.

The two articles I read then become my framework to explore some useful websites for teaching writing and reading, http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/, http://www.manythings.org/, and etc. are only some resources which are very helpful to support me to teach the skills related with written texts. They are treasure for me.

For the lesson plan task, I have learned to design my own lesson plan with technology. I used the template from Deborah Healey to design a course on using microsoft word references menu and websites for checking plagiarism. I have used the microsoft for automatically inserting the bibliography based on APA referencing style. However, I have not used it in integrated way in the courses I teach. This might be my next plan.

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Finally, in this week I find a clear objective about my project. Dealing with the issue of plagiarism and using the standard referencing style will be my focus in the project. With the assistance of technology, I will support my students to read, write, and research better with integrity without academic misconducts issues like plagiarism.

This picture will be my tagline for this week.

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